- Introducing a New Breed of Wine Yeast: Interspecific Hybridisation between a Commercial Saccharomyces cerevisiae Wine Yeast and Saccharomyces mikatae. The future of wine?
- Breeding systems, hybridization and continuing evolution in Avon Gorge Sorbus. You had me at “Avon Gorge, Bristol, UK, is a world ‘hotspot’ for Sorbus diversity.”
- Taro leaf blight — A threat to global food security. Yes, but we have the technology…
- Agromorphological characterization of Sesamum radiatum (Schum. and Thonn.), a neglected and underutilized species of traditional leafy vegetable of great importance in Benin. Yes, but we need the technology…
- Phenoscope: an automated large-scale phenotyping platform offering high spatial homogeneity. Somebody mention technology?
- An Inventory of Crop Wild Relatives of the United States. More than you’d think.
- Empirical Test of an Agricultural Landscape Model. The Importance of Farmer Preference for Risk Aversion and Crop Complexity. It’s not just about profit. At least in the UK.
- Using citizen scientists to measure an ecosystem service nationwide. Bullshit. No, really, it’s about the decomposition of cow pats.
- Intragenesis and cisgenesis as alternatives to transgenic crop development. Spingenesis.
- Managing biodiversity rich hay meadows in the EU: a comparison of Swedish and Romanian grasslands. Both need more input from local knowledge.
- Mediterranean Hedysarum phylogeny by transferable microsatellites from Medicago. Wait, Sulla? What happened to Hedysarum?
- Polymorphic microsatellite markers in pineapple (Ananas comosus (L.) Merrill). And?
Vintage plant genetic resources videos
I’m pretty sure we have blogged in the past about “A Neglected Heritage,” a documentary film about plant genetic resources produced by Ulf Gyllensten in 1984 for the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (now Bioversity International) in cooperation with the Nordic Gene Bank. But, alas, I can find no evidence of that. Anyway, you can see it, and other NordGen videos, on a blip.tv channel curated by Dag Endresen.
Nibbles: Beer edition
- Genebank saves beer!
- Not so fast…
- So, lets get back to basics shall we, and the dawn of brewing, recreated (again).
Nibbles: Trees, Gates on CG, Gardens, NUS surveys, GMOs, Free range livestock, Tasty fish, Traditional potatoes
- Britain gets a tree seed bank. Wait, it didn’t already have one? St Helena seems to, sort of. And Cameroon. And why they’re needed more than ever; and more. Although in Brazil trees can be the bad guys.
- Bill Gates praises CIMMYT, and the CGIAR as a whole.
- A Renaissance garden recreated in NYC.
- A survey on moringa. And one on achocha and oca.
- And speaking of deconstructing weird crops, how about saffron?
- Yet another one of those GMOs-are-not-as-bad-as-you-think pieces. Is any of this getting through, I wonder?
- Free range pigs in Kenya and the USA.
- Speaking of free range livestock… Well, a species distantly related to livestock anyway. Oh, and here’s another restoration story, from another continent.
- Free range glass eels too. And salmon, after a fashion.
- Traditional potatoes in fancy Lima restaurants. Maybe with pork or fish?
Nibbles: SRI in Indonesia, SRI in Nepal, Diversity in GMO review, Climate change fears, Ancient grind in China
- System of Rice Intensification increases yields, not incomes, because it takes time away from other jobs. Caveats apply.
- Which does not deter Rajendra Uprety, an SRI activist, in Nepal, where rice farmers “hydridize technology”.
- In reviewing the global march of GMOs, a plea for policies to promote “much more crop diversity”. Well of course we agree.
- US food company executives fear “weather extremes” more than anything else in 2013.
- The same fears may have driven Chinese people to food processing 23,000 years ago. A grind not being able to access the PNAS paper.